Chapter III

Art for the People

1.

In the second part of the preceding chapter we considered the
problem of the responsibility of the artist to men from the point of
view of the artist and of his own conscience.

I should like to add, in relation to the saying of François
Mauriac: to purify the source, on which I laid stress, that
this maxim refers especially to writers. No doubt it matters in one
sense to all artists, painters or composers as well as poets, inasmuch
as they should, as men, and as every man, be concerned with their own
spiritual good and their own progress toward the perfection of human
life. And when the source becomes purer in them, by the same stroke
their work itself will convey higher and larger human values:
will this work also have greater artistic value, will it be
artistically better or worse? That is a problem, a melancholy problem,
which I shall try to tackle in my last chapter.

But Mauriac's saying is directed especially to writers and poets,
and more especially to novelists. It is especially when it comes to
writers that the maxim: purify the source, imposes itself in relation
to the impact of the work on the moral life and standards of other men,
and on the moral health of the community, and in relation to the
possibly vivifying and salutary, or possibly degrading and corrupting
influence of the work.(15)
For the writer works with words, which convey ideas and stir the
imagination and which act through intelligence on all the rational and
emotional fabric of notions and beliefs, images, passions and instincts
on which the moral life of man depends.

In my present discussion, therefore, I shall have especially in view
the case of the writer. But I shall not consider the problem from the
point of view of the other fellow, the point of view of the public, the
point of view of the human community.

Here we are confronted no longer with the motto Art for Art's
sake, but with an opposite motto, which appeals today to many
sociologically-minded or politically-minded or humanitarian persons,
and which is the motto: Art for the people, or Art for the
community.

I am aware of the fact such a formula may relate only to the
intentions of an artist who is inspired by generous human purposes
while his virtue of art is genuinely at play for the good of the work,
especially to the intentions of an artist who is eager to have the joys
of Beauty made available not only to a privileged class but to the
under-privileged as well. Such a desire corresponds, I think, to a
basic need and necessity. But let me observe parenthetically that it is
best fulfilled when an artist is more concerned with future generations
and the spiritual community of mankind as a whole than with the common
people of his time, and when, on the other hand, the great works of
art, once created, are made available to all through the channel of
libraries, museums and other modern media of communication, and by
making all members of the community capable of enjoying them thanks to
a liberal education for all: -- these things are the job of the
community, not of the artist himself. As a matter of fact, the attempts
to put creative activity itself at the service of the common people
have generally been a failure.

Well, if the motto Art for the people is understood in the
manner I have just suggested, I have nothing against it. But as it is
used in actual fact, this motto relates to the exigencies of those who,
speaking in the name of the human community, want to raise the needs or
ideals of the community to the status of a rule of creation imposed on
the very making of the work. In this sense, just as Art for Art's sake
simply disregards the world of morality, and the values of human life,
and the fact that an artist is a man, so the motto Art for
the people simply disregards the world of art itself, and the
values of the creative intellect, and the fact that an artist is an
artist.

It is true that art finally serves the good of the human community
-- in a deep and mysterious sense, that I shall try to indicate at the
end of this chapter. But the error consists in misunderstanding and
misusing this true notion and believing accordingly that the social or
moral value of the work must enter the very sphere of the making as its
supreme standard.

At this point a little more searching analysis seems relevant. I
have said that any human intention or purpose whatsoever may incite the
artist on condition that the movement of his art toward the work does
not deviate, and that his art is strong enough to keep its autonomy in
its own sphere.

How is this possible? How can art's autonomy remain intact under
such an incitation?

In two ways, I think. Either because the human end intended
remains completely extrinsic to the domain or art's activity, as the
wages are for a worker, or the royalties for a writer, or success for
any artist. Or because that which moves the artist is fully
integrated with his own creative subjectivity and creative
experience.

I would say that what we call in French la commande, the
fact of the artist being commissioned to do a certain task, by some
patron, prince or wealthy art fancier, falls in the category of the
first case. Here we have a problem posed for the artist from the
outside; it delimits the subject matter, but only the creative activity
of the artist solves it. Paul Valéry asserted that nothing would
please him more than being commissioned to write a poem of a given
number of lines and even of words, and even of letters. Under such
circumstances the craftsmanship of a watchmaker would display all its
power; and Valéry dreamed of being a perfect watchmaker.

In the other case, when the poet obeys an idea or a passion which is
dear to him -- especially a passion or an idea as remote in itself from
spiritual creativity as a social idea or a social
passion is -- there is, no doubt, a risk involved, because such a
passion or idea, while taking part in the operation of art, remains, as
long as it has not been integrated in creative experience or intuitive
emotion, a factor external to art, and thus risks superseding the
requirements of art or preying upon them. Thus it is that it is bad
luck, as a rule, for a poet to become a national poet: though
in certain instances good poems have been written under the fire of
national or even political passion. But in these instance -- and this
is my point -- the passion in question had internalized in the
creative source, integrated in the poetic intuition, and therefore
transmuted; for then, once it has been thus integrated in poetic
intuition, what had been an idea or a passion has become poetic
knowledge. There is no longer a passion, or an idea participating in
the management of the making, there is poetic knowledge, inspiring
all the management of the making. And this is all the more
true as we have to do with more universal and all-pervading passions,
ideas or beliefs: religious, philosophical, metaphysical, or with the
unified intellectual and cultural universe that a Dante, a Donne, or a
Shakespeare carried in his mind. All these human riches were in these
poets, when they were at work, in the state of poetic fire or creative
intuition.

I would submit that in the two cases I have just delineated only the
virtue of art commands, and nothing else intervenes. In the first case,
in the case la commande, it is because the end intended by the
artist or the conditions imposed upon him remain entirely
outside. In the second case, in the case of the idea or
passion fully integrated in creative emotion, it is because the human
impulse or motion does not need to enter; it is in
from the start, being one with the poetic intuition which animates the
virtue of art and passes through it, and which all the rules of the
making have to obey. Thus the autonomy of art is not impaired; it is,
on the contrary, increased and fortified, for the influence exercised
on it is like that of the sun and the climate on a plant, and the
motion it receives acts from within and passes into it in the
manner of an inspiration.

*

But the theory of Art for the social group is not concerned
with such problems or with a notion of the autonomy of art. It simply
ignores this autonomy; it makes the social value, or
social significance, or social impact of the work
into an aesthetic or artistic value, even the supreme aesthetic or
artistic value. According to this theory, a good which is not the good
of the work, but a certain good of human life, is made into the very
object, essential and intrinsic, determining and specifying, of the
very virtue or art. One believes that the work must be ruled and shaped
and brought into being not with regard to the creative
intuition in which it originates and the rules of making which it calls
for, but with regard to some moral or social requirements to
be satisfied; one believes that the work must be immediately touched
and attained, in its very making, by judgments and determinations which
depend not on the virtue of art but on emotions, purposes or interests
of the moral or social order. To this very extent art is warped and
bent to the service of a master who is not its only genuine master,
namely the work, its true object, in the service of which it achieves
its own inalienable freedom. Art for the social group becomes,
thus, inevitably propaganda art. What the existentialist fashion calls
today engaged art, "l'art engagé" -- we might say as well
enlisted art, or drafted art -- is, inevitably, propaganda art, either
for moral or anti-moral, social, political or philosophical, religious
or anti-religious purpose. An artist who yields to this craving for
regimentation fails by the same token in his gifts, in his calling and
in his proper virtue.

Art, like knowledge, is appendent to values which are independent of
the interests, even the noblest interests, of human life, for they are
values of the intellectual order, Poets do not come on the stage after
dinner, to afford ladies and gentlemen previously satiated with
terrestrial food the intoxication of pleasures which are of no
consequence. But neither are they waiters who provide them with the
bread of existentialist nausea, Marxist dialectics or traditional
morality, the beef of political realism or idealism and the ice-cream
of philanthropy. They provide mankind with a spiritual food, which is
intuitive experience, revelation and beauty: for man, as I said in my
youth, is an animal who lives on transcendentals. Plato, the Plato of
the Republic, held poets to be deceptive imitators of imitations,
pernicious to the city, its truths and its morals. At least he was fair
to them in expelling them from the state. He knew that poetry, as long
as it remains poetry, will never and can never become an instrument of
the State.

*

Yet the theory of art for the social community, which I
just criticized, arose, as a matter of fact, from the very excess of
the theory of Art for Art's sake. The system and practice of
the complete irresponsibility of the artist, who writes freely only if
he is sure that it does not matter what he writes, runs, as we have
seen, against the grain of nature. A reaction from the social community
was inevitable. People cannot indefinitely bear to have their basic
standards and beliefs mocked or undermined, their moral heritage
threatened, their own minds confused or their imaginations poisoned for
the sake of the artist's irresponsibility. These reactions can be dull
and queer, philistine, misguided or simply coarse. They are a
phenomenon of natural, so to speak biological defense. I read some
years ago a press release whose authenticity I don't vouch for, but
which at least had punch in it. The story was that the workers in a
printing office had refused to print the manuscript of a most talented
writer -- a man whose prose is impeccable -- because the were revolted
by its lewdness. If the story is true, such a spontaneous reaction was
quite symptomatic.

I wonder, nevertheless, whether a spontaneous censorship by the
printers, if it were to spread, would be particularly commendable, both
with respect to art itself and finally the common good. Indeed, if we
give free rein to our imagination, may we not visualize, in a kind of
nightmare, the possibility of a more general phenomenon, namely a
revolt of the so-called common man against the intelligentsia at large,
whose irresponsible achievements have put everything in jeopardy? Let
us kill the physicists with their atom-bombs, the biologists with their
biological warfare, the philosophers with their Babel of queries, the
professors with their atomizing of human brains, the newspapermen with
their maddening thrills, modern painters with their rabid distortions,
modern novelists and poets with their it does not matter what we
write? There was something of such a revolt against intelligence,
and yearning for barbarism, in a certain worshipping of "life" and
toadyism of "the people" in Nazi Germany.

The kind of nightmare I just imagined has no chance of becoming a
reality -- not, I think, because people lack the resentment involved,
but because they lack, fortunately, the power of satisfying it in this
way. Yet a worse reality can confront mankind. People have no power,
but totalitarian States do have power to enforce the control of
morality -- their own peculiar morality -- over the workings of the
intellect, especially over art and poetry. Then, as Hitler's regime and
Stalin's regime have shown, creative activities are accountable to the
State and subservient to the State; the artist and the writer have a
primary moral obligation toward politics; they must also comply with
the aesthetic tenets set forth by the State which claims to express and
protect the needs of the people. The State does not expel Homer, as
Plato naively wanted. It tries to domesticate him.

2.

Is there, then, a solution to the problem? I believe there is; and
here, as in all other instances, we are not condemned to choose between
anarchism and totalitarianism. But this solution cannot sweep away all
possibility of tension and conflict. On the contrary, it makes capital
out of them, as whenever two freedoms meet and have to adjust to one
another.

As concerns the human community, we have to recognize that freedom
of expression and freedom or art are not those absolute and limitless,
divine rights which XIXth century anarchistic liberalism enthroned.
They are natural rights in the sense that they answer natural
aspirations of thought and creative activity. But they are not absolute
and limitless in nature. It is not true that every thought or artifact
as such, poisonous as it may be, has, because of the mere fact that it
was born of a human mind, an absolute right to be displayed in the
human community. As Thomas Aquinas put it,(16) if an art produces objects
which men cannot use without committing sin, idols for idolatry for
instance, or -- he might have said, if he had lived in the time of la
marquise de Brinvilliers -- poisoned bouquets for murder, it is only
normal to make the trade of idols or of poisoned bouquets impossible.

Yet it is with the art of the writer that we are dealing, and
writers do not contrive, at least as the specific object of their art,
idols or poisoned bouquets. Writers are concerned with ideas and they
communicate ideas. So it is necessary to go more closely into the
question.

Let us read for this purpose article Nineteen in the Universal
Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed by the United Nations in
December 1948. I think that this article was written by some
exceedingly shrewd or exceedingly lucky jurist, for it appears simple
and self-evident, and yet it implies an unexpressed though quite
serious No concealed behind a strong and glorious
Yes.

This article reads: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion
and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinion and
expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers."

To impart ideas: All the shrewdness -- the unexpressed
No together with the ringing Yes -- is concentrated
in this word ideas.

Freedom to impart or spread ideas is one with freedom of
research and thought, which is a natural right of the mind, and
manifests the superior dignity of thought with respect to the social
community.(17)

But freedom to impart ideas is not freedom to undertake or exercise
actions, for actions can be repressed if they tend to destroy
the foundations of life in common. It is obvious that the social
community has a right to defend itself against such actions, for
instance an attempt to overthrow freedom by violence or to organize
crime and murder.

Such a distinction is obvious and necessary. But its application is
not without risks and difficulties. For the use of ideas can
itself aim at action.

At this point we must be quite careful in our analysis. I am not
referring to the fact that all great ideas, including (and chiefly) the
most abstract and theoretical ones, are laden with a tremendous
implicit power of action. It is so with philosophical systems, with the
successive scientific images of the world, with great literary works.
If by reason of this fact, and by reason of the practical consequences
that can be expected from a work, the social group had a right to
forbid a man to "impart" his "ideas," freedom of expression would
simply vanish. It is on such grounds that Socrates was condemned, and
that Frederick the Great turned an indignant eye on Kant's categorical
imperative, it being of a nature to lead his grenadiers astray. Let it
be noted parenthetically that such behavior on the part of the social
authority is only logical according to Marxist theory, where thought is
by nature praxis or action.

The distinction I am pointing out does not refer to the greater or
lesser power of action which is involved in an idea. It refers to the
fact that the use of ideas corresponds to two obviously distinct
functions and purposes. Either the use of ideas is directed toward the
search for knowledge or expression of creative experience, and belongs
to the field of Thought or Idea proper -- or the use of ideas is
directed toward bringing about, here and now, a given practical effect,
and belongs to the field of Action and incitation to action. Hence
inevitable conflicts. Suppose that a political lunatic publishes
pamphlets in which he advocates the mass-murder of Jews or the
destruction of the incurably ill, who are a burden to the community
(this was not a hypothetical example at the time of Nazi Germany) -- or
suppose that a religious lunatic prints papers inciting his fellow
sectarians to collective suicide (this was not an inconceivable example
at the time of the Old-Believers Sect in Russia). These men will claim
freedom to express and impart their ideas. But the social
community and its various groups are directly interested in those
incitations to action, and they would be foolish not to oppose
them by some appropriate means -- means which would not involve open
and official censorship, if the community hated the very name of
censorship, or would reduce it to a minimum, but which would constitute
for all that efficacious prohibitive devices.

Difficult and risky in application as it may be, the distinction is
grounded in reality, and necessary. When it comes to the moral
or immoral value of a literary work, the community may have to
guard its standards against it to the extent that it is an
incitation to action. The problem is simple in the case of the
products of the pornographic industry -- they deal with conditioned
reflexes, not with ideas. But it becomes quite entangled when it is a
question of literary works properly speaking, in which a hope to awaken
some unavowable complicity or an open disregard of accepted standards
is involved, either in a more or less spurious or in a genuine or even
superior spiritual creativity. We cannot deny that people who are not
specialists in literature have a right to be warned against reading
authors whose artistic talent is but a means to unburden their vices
and obsessions on us. On the other hand we cannot deny that the
attempts of the State to condemn Les Fleurs du mal or
Madame Bovary or any other great work are themselves condemned
to failure and succeed chiefly in making the State look ridiculous.

*

The fact remains that, in the sense in which I have been arguing and
for the reasons I have tried to make clear, certain limitations on the
exercise of freedom of expression are both inevitable in actual
existence and justifiable in themselves. But there is no clear
objective borderline between the two domains which we have
distinguished, so that the quarrel between the moral interests of the
community and the aesthetic interests of the artist will never cease.
In actual fact the application of our distinction is only a matter of
prudent or wise practical judgment. At this point let me emphasize the
fact that the only reason for limitations being brought to bear on
freedom of expression is the common good of the human community. And
because this common good is the common good of human persons, it
implies as an essential part a respect for intellectual
values, dealing with truth and beauty, which are supra-political in
nature; a respect for freedom of inquiry, which is a basic
right of the human person; and a respect for the inner
energies of intelligence and conscience, which are the mainsprings of
social and political life, and which cannot be coerced, but can adhere
only to what they have good reasons to believe true. The common good is
ruined if the human community ignores these three kinds of respect. And
so it is in the very name of the common good that any limitations which
may legitimately be brought to bear on freedom of expression and
freedom of art should always respect the basic freedom and dignity of
the intellect and be calculated to foster, not impair them.

Shall I indicate briefly some of the practical conclusions which
derive from this principle? Let us remember first the distinction which
must be made between the social community and the
State. The State is but a part, the topmost part but a part,
of the social community or the body politic. And the effort to protect
the human society from the pernicious actions or incitations to action
possibly conveyed by a work is the job of the social community more
than of the State. The first responsibility rests on the social
community as distinct from the State.

The first way for the human community to confront the risks of
possible drawbacks resulting from freedom of expression and freedom of
art is education, which equips the mind with vital powers of
resistance, criticism and discrimination. In the second place, there is
the spontaneous pressure of the common consciousness and public
opinion, springing from the national ethos when it is firmly
established. In the third place there is the pressure which results
from the fact that large groups of citizens may warn their members
against reading a book or seeing a moving picture (even if it is a
question of great works, for everything depends here on the moral
standards, the intellectual preparation, the degree of moral solidity
and the age of the strata of population involved). And in the fourth
place there is the activity of the various private groups and
organizations which, freely starting from the bottom and uniting on the
one hand readers or listeners, on the other writers or speakers, should
develop, as regards the use of the media of mass communication, a
ceaseless process of self-regulation as well as a growing sense of
responsibility.

As regards the State, its right, which cannot be denied, to
intervene in the field of artistic creativity and of the expression of
thought, demands, I think, to be applied in a most limited way. And
since the common agreement on the basic tenets of a free society is
itself merely practical, the criterion for any interference of the
State should be of a merely practical, not ideological nature. The more
extraneous this criterion is to the very content of thought or to the
inner value of the work the better it will be. It is too much for the
State to judge, for instance, whether a work of art is possessed of an
intrinsic quality of immorality (then it would condemn Baudelaire or
Joyce); it is enough for it to judge whether an author or a publisher
plans to make money by selling obscenities, or inducing civil discord,
or circulating libel. Why such restrictions on the exercise of the
rights of the State? Because the fact is that the State is not equipped
to deal with matters of intelligence. Each time the State disregards
this basic truth, intelligence is victimized. And since intelligence
always has its revenge, it is the social body and the human community
which, one way or another, are victimized in the end.(18)

Finally, among the various external means we are now considering,
the function exercised by free discussion and criticism is the most
natural one: for then it is the very freedom of expression of thought
and of artistic activity which counteracts the possible drawbacks of
artistic activity. At this point I would like to emphasize that the
literary critic and the creative writer are in reality the same person
in two different functions. A critic in science or in philosophy is a
scientist or a philosopher; a critic in poetry is a poet -- sometimes
paralyzed as to the creative work by an excessive development of the
reflective faculties, but fundamentally a poet. Thus in criticism we
have art itself freely and rationally discussing and regulating art.
And criticism has a double function: first to judge the work for the
sake of art and aesthetic values; and second, to point out, for the
sake of the human community, the moral implications contained in the
work. Thomas Aquinas warned teachers "never to dig" in the path of the
student "a pit that you fail to fill up." The same can be said of
critics with respect to the reader. The task of genuine criticism is a
task of ceaseless purification and enlightenment, first as regards the
creative activity itself of the artist, second as regards the common
consciousness of the people.

3.

Thus the key to our problem -- as concerns the possible interference
of the social community restricting from the outside the free
expression of literary or artistic activity, or more exactly, the free
circulation of its products, through some spontaneous pressure or even
through more or less coercive means -- the key to our problem is a
true sense of the common good, and of the respect for
intelligence and conscience that the common good basically
requires.

Now I should like to point out that this true sense of the common
good has with regard to art and poetry (and now I am speaking of art in
general, not only of literature) much wider and far-reaching
implications. For a true sense of the common good understands that Art
and Poetry, though or rather because they deal with an object
independent in itself of the rules and standards of human life and the
human community, play an essential and indispensable part in the
existence of mankind. Man cannot live a genuine human life except by
participating to some extent in the supra-human life of the spirit, or
of what is eternal in him. He needs all the more desperately poets and
poetry as they keep aloof from the sad business and standards of the
rational animal's maintenance and guidance, and give testimony to the
freedom of the spirit. It is precisely to the extent to which poetry is
useless and disengaged that poetry is necessary, because it
brings to men a vision of reality-beyond-reality, an experience of the
secret meanings of things, an obscure insight into the universe of
beauty, without which men could neither live nor live morally. For, as
St. Thomas put it, "nobody can do without delectation for long. That is
why he is deprived of spiritual delectations goes over to the
carnal."(19) And St. Theresa
of Avila used to say that even for contemplatives, if there were no
poetry life would not be tolerable. Leave, then, the artist to his art:
he serves the community better than the engineer or the tradesman.

At this point I should like to quote a passage from Shelley's
Defense of Poetry. After having claimed -- which seems quite
questionable -- that "the greatest poets have been men of the most
spotless virtue," Shelley cannot help realizing that such has not
always been the case. Then he projects himself, through an oratorical
movement, to the opposite extreme in the manner of a concession to the
vulgar. "Let us for a moment, he says, stop to the arbitration of
popular breath . . . Let us assume Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil
was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman,
that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that
Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of
our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice
to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighted and
found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins 'were as scarlet,
they are now white as snow'; they have been washed in the blood of
the mediator and redeemer, Time."(20)

A poet who counted upon this kind of redeemer for his own salvation
would be strangely mistaken. Time is not the redeemer of the poet's
soul. But it is indeed the redeemer of the poet's work. In this sense
Shelley is right and he forces us to confront a great truth.

*

I would say that the common good of mankind is as indifferent as Art
itself is to the personal destiny of the poet and to his good --
temporal or eternal -- as a man. Let him incur damnation, if only his
work enriches the spiritual treasure of the world. The poet is alone,
alone with God, as every man is, in the management of his own destiny.
Neither his art nor the generations which will live on him are of any
help.

In the realm of the earthly destiny of the work, in the realm of the
world, or of civilization, not only are the sins of poets washed in the
blood of Time, but also the possibly sinful impact of their works.

The statues of Greek gods no longer wound human souls with the
arrows of idolatry. They have lost their magical and bewitching power.
Only beauty remains. In poems like those of Baudelaire or
Lautréamont, or in the novels in which Proust makes an ambiguous
confession, the moral impact through which human souls may possibly be
wounded is blurred and extinguished by Time -- only some deeper
revelation of the heart of man remains. The clearest result of the work
of Baudelaire has been to turn modern poetry toward the universe of the
spirit, and to awaken in men a theological sense.

Here again Shelley was right in insisting that "whatever strengthens
and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit
to sense, is useful" -- useful with the utility of what is beyond
utility. And Shelley also wrote: "All high poetry is infinite; it is as
the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil
may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never
exposed. A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the
waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has
exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations
enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new
relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an
unconceived delight."(21)

I would submit that as concerns the final contribution of art to the
common good of the human race, not only in relation to the fact that
man cannot do without poetry, but also in relation to the progress of
moral conscience itself, what essentially matters is the depth
of the creative experience, the depth of the creative source. For in
the long run any deeper awareness of what is hidden in man turns to a
greater enlightenment of moral conscience. Here we are confronted with
the most real and mysterious sense in which art serves the community --
in its very freedom from the interests of the social group.

With respect to the perfection of life of the poet himself, and to
the immediate moral impact of his work, Mauriac's remark holds true;
the only way is to "purify the source."

But with respect to that final impact on the common good of mankind
of which we are now speaking, it is not the purity of the source, it is
rather its depth, it is the inner depth of the experience from which it
springs which is of primary importance in actual fact.

Perhaps this explains why, scarlet as the sins of the poet may have
been, odious perhaps as he may have been as a man, we love him
nevertheless, because he was a poet, and we are grateful to him, not
only as lovers of beauty, but also as men concerned with the mystery of
their own destiny; and he is white as snow to our eyes -- in his work.
In any case we do not have to judge him. God will work that out with
him, somehow or other.

4.

I have a few words to add to conclude this chapter. Theorists in
aesthetics are usually concerned with the role of art in reference to
the human community. But they should also be concerned with the role of
the human community in reference to art. Since the community needs art
and the artists, the community has certain duties toward them. Just as
the writer must be responsible, so must the community.

In actual fact what the artist, the poet, the composer, the
playwright expects from his fellow men, as a normal condition of
development for his own effort, is to be listened to, I mean
intelligently, to get a response, I mean an active and generous one, to
have them cooperate with him in this way, and to feel himself in a
certain communion with them, instead of being confined, as happens so
often nowadays, in an intellectual ghetto.

This means that the primary duty of the human community toward art
is to respect it and its spiritual dignity, and to be interested in its
living process of creation and discovery. It is no more easy nor
arbitrary to judge a work of art than to judge a work of science or
philosophy. A work of art conveys to us that spiritual treasure which
is the artist's own singular truth, for the sake of which he risks
everything and to which he must be heroically faithful. We should judge
of it as the living vehicle of this hidden truth; and the first
condition for such a judgment is a kind of previous consent to
the intentions of the artist and to the creative perspectives in which
he is placed. In judging of the artistic achievements of their
contemporaries, people have a responsibility, both toward the artist
and toward themselves, insofar as they need poetry and beauty. They
should be aware of this responsibility.